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Wednesday, 11 November 2015

Writing this post is actually reasonably challenging because what I am writing about is a work in progress and I have not actually completed yet but instead of going completely dark on the blog I thought I would let you guys know what I have been up to.

So let's deal with first things first...

Why haven't I been writing blog posts?

Not writing blog posts for a blogger is the best way you can think of to kill a blog and I had this experience a few years ago when I was going through a tough patch and blogging and finance were not the foremost thing going on in my life. Thankfully this time that is not the reason I stopped writing.

The fact is that I used my honeymoon to reassess what was important to me and what I wanted and needed to be spending my time on. I love writing this blog and have loved writing it since my first post in 2011. That hasn't changed at all.

I stopped writing as many posts because I came to the realisation that it was taking time away from things I needed to be doing more. At one point I was writing 1 - 2 posts per day on this blog. Each posts would take at least 45 minutes to write and some which required more research took considerably longer. I was happy to do it too but given that it was taking ~4 hours of my week it needed to be assessed alongside all the other things I could be doing with my time.

What I needed to do therefore was to work out exactly what I wanted to do with my life and importantly what the most productive thing I could be doing with my time.

Monday, 2 November 2015

Apologies to everyone for my absence from the blog for a significant amount of time. I went on my honeymoon for just over 5 weeks and although I have been back for about 3 weeks now I have made some major changes in my life (which I would love to share with you guys and I will do so in an upcoming post) which mean that I am now spending far less time blogging than I used to be.

These net worth posts will continue into the future though so if that's what you come to this blog for...have no fear!

Net Worth: $661,000 (+3.4%)

Value

% Change

Assets

$1,079,000

+2.6%

Liabilities

$418,000

+1.3%

Net worth

$661,000

+3.4%

This change represents two months of net worth progress and although it pales in comparison to previous months where I really had gangbuster returns there was actually quite a lot going on under the hood. The 3.4% increase above actually represented an $22,000 increase in my net worth and given the changes I'm going to outline below...I'm actually pretty happy with that!

Below are just a few of the items which affected my net worth over the last 2 months:

We paid for our honeymoon expenditure out of savings...but we continued to earn our wages at the same time

My wife and I had fully funded our honeymoon through a years worth of savings. I had accounted for the upcoming expenditure as a 'future liability' and so the cash saved for this honeymoon never really formed part of my net worth

However while we were away for 5 weeks we didn't really spend any money that wasn't part of this savings AND we continued to each receive our wages

This meant that we had far more cash in the bank when we returned than we originally anticipated

We put all of this extra cash towards our home loan

My bonus shares vested this month...however this was a net negative

As part of the bonus I receive from work I receive shares which I am not allowed to sell for a period of time

I account for these shares as part of my net worth as I have no intention of leaving this job

However there is a tax impact of actually being granted these shares and I don't know the impact of this until they actually vest

This actually had a significant negative impact on my net worth this month